


A Jar Without Air

by Amatia (orphan_account)



Category: The Interpreter (2005)
Genre: Gen, Letters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-08
Updated: 2010-03-08
Packaged: 2017-10-07 19:37:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Amatia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>What's wrong with you?  I look at you<br/>and I find nothing in you but two eyes<br/>like all eyes, a mouth<br/>lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful,<br/>a body just like those that have slipped<br/>beneath my body without leaving any memory</p><p>-         Pablo Neruda</p>
    </blockquote>





	A Jar Without Air

**Author's Note:**

> What's wrong with you? I look at you  
> and I find nothing in you but two eyes  
> like all eyes, a mouth  
> lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful,  
> a body just like those that have slipped  
> beneath my body without leaving any memory
> 
> \- Pablo Neruda

He writes letters; short, sometimes meaningless paragraphs on the backs of takeout menus retrieved from the backseats of cars during stakeouts.  Outside apartment buildings and townhouses, in snow and rain, his handwriting always sharp and angular and stark against the paper.

 

At the office he prints the letters out on the formal letterhead, censoring his words on the computer screen, erasing his thoughts and replacing them with stupid questions and talk of the weather.  He shreds the menus. 

 

There’s a day when Dot picks up a page from the printer and skims it.  He lets her.  “That is the coldest, most clinical thing I have ever read,” she says to him, but Tobin just shrugs.  “And I thought I could boil things down.”  She hands the paper over.  Dot knows him better than anyone now.  She can read him better than everyone else but she doesn’t bring it up.  He remembers when Laurie left the second time. Dot brought him a bottle of bourbon and they nearly had sex on his couch.  Her blouse had been unbuttoned with Tobin’s mouth on her breasts before she’d pushed on his shoulders.  “I don’t think you want to do this,” she’d said, and she’d been right. 

 

They had never spoken of it again, and now he takes the letter from her and looks at what he’d written.

_It’s cold.  I would guess that by now you barely remember what snow was like here, but it’s dirty and lines the streets in ugly piles.  _

_What are you doing in Maboto? What I imagine for you is likely to be wrong.  I’m sure of that.  Reassure me that you are not marching along the side of a road.  _

_I’m starting to forget what she looked like.  I don’t know if this is a good thing or bad.  But I’ve changed the message on the answering machine.  ‘You’ve reached Tobin Keller.  Leave a message.’  No one calls me at home anyway._

_You probably saw it on the television, but there was a funeral march for Kuman-Kuman last week.  The line of people stretched a city block.  I saw it from a window and thought of you._

_I’m fine.  I hope you’re well._

 

“There’s not much to say,” he says to Dot.

 

She doesn’t look convinced.  “Have you heard from her?”

 

“No.”

 

“You need to get out more.”

 

“Dot-“

 

“I’m just saying, Tobin.”

 

He folds the letter and slips it in an envelope, and then Jay’s banging his open palm against the doorframe. “Woods, Keller – you’re up.”

 

Later, in the car, he writes:

 

_I drift through the days, except less like drifting and more like there’s a fog I can’t shake.  Does that make sense?  I know your belief in words but I’ve never been great at choosing the correct ones.  What’s wrong with you, I ask myself.  Every morning when I get up, every day when I go in to the office and Dot looks at me, in her eyes the same question.  I’m not who I was before, I guess is the answer.  Everyone looks the same to me now.  I look for my wife’s face in everyone else’s face, but I suppose that’s what grief is.  I know that soon her face will be everyone else’s face and her body the same as everyone else’s, because time has passed and I know I will not remember as well as I did the day after. The week after.  A sea of people.  _

_Why I can tell you these things and not my partner, who is the closest I have to a true friend, I don’t understand.  But why should I stop now?  It’s easier to talk to someone three continents away than it is to talk to someone three feet away.  You don’t have to look them in the eye.  Maybe that’s my problem.  I’m better at work, I told my boss, but I don’t know how true that is.  Better than getting drunk at home. _

_Maybe I will come to Africa.  But would you be there to meet me? _


End file.
